Harpo Speaks! (60 page)

Alex was more vague about college. He was as obsessed with cars as Minnie was with horses. He had one specific ambition. College or no college, he was going to own and operate his own garage some day. It was going to be called “Lou’s Garage.” When we asked him why “Lou’s,” he said he didn’t know-it just sounded like a good name for a garage. That was the kind of reasoning that the Alexander he was named for, who died the year Alex was born, would have adored.

The dogs jogged back in sight, their tongues hanging out, looking for a shady place to plop down for their siesta. The sunbathing mountains were losing their early-morning wrinkles. That meant it was getting on toward golf time.

I was playing very badly anyway. I was lousy, in fact. I plucked an awful clinker of a chord. Another one. My God! I thought-I’d better start putting in this extra hour every day. I couldn’t have been sloppier if I’d been playing with mittens on. Then all of a sudden I couldn’t play at all. I felt a pain in my middle. The strength went out of my fingers. I felt sick, very sick.

I called to Susan. She came as far as the doorway, looked at me, then ran back to her room and telephoned for the doctor.

The doctor thumped me and tapped me and checked all my vibrations. I told him I felt like a kettledrum being tuned up for a concert. He looked under my eyelids and examined other secret places. I said I couldn’t decide now whether he was a kettledrummer or a customs inspector. He ran the sharp end of a fingernail file up the bottoms of my feet, hard. I said, “You still haven’t found where it itches. Could you tickle me on the left foot again, and this time wobble it a bit?”

The doctor didn’t laugh. He didn’t even give me a bedside smile. He said, “Mr. Marx, I’m a great admirer of yours and I’d love to sit here and crack jokes with you. But I must tell you the blunt truth. You have had a heart attack.”

I said, “Bad?”

He said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

But when I said, “Quote me any odds?” he shook his head and gave me a sickly bedside smile.

It wasn’t bad. It was what is known as a “mild” attack. I was re-examined, cardiographed, checked for cholesterol, prescribed for, put on a diet, and sent to an L.A. hospital for six weeks of “precautionary bed rest.”

The specialist who’d taken me over gave me a pep talk the day I checked into the hospital. He said the one thing that would help me most was something I could only prescribe for myself. I should retire.

I asked him what he meant by retire. He spelled it out. No more work. No more engagements of any kind. No more golf. No more harp. Nothing but pure, full-time leisure.

I said I thought this was a pretty stiff rap, considering the offense-one lousy bellyache. He said, “Think about it some more.” I did. I thought about the last days of Frenchie, and of Aleck. I thought about all the days to come for Susan, and for Bill and Alex and Minnie and Jimmy.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess you’re right. The first thing I’ll do when I get up out of this bed and put on my clothes and go home is retire. Then what do I do?”

“What’s the most relaxing thing you’ve ever done in your life?” he asked me.

“Taking off my shoes and lying on the grass and flying a kite so the string tickles the bottom of my feet,” I said, without any hesitation.

The doctor said, “Harpo, the best piece of medical advice I can give you is this-go fly a kite.”

It didn’t sink in until the doctor left, and I began to reflect on the meaning of the decision I had made. Retirement. This meant good-bye. Good-bye to the closest companion I ever had, a companion who’d given me thousands of hours of exasperation, botheration and pure joy-my harp.

And what about my name? Shouldn’t I maybe have it changed now? How about Adolph Ex-Harpo Marx? No. Not a very good gag. I couldn’t come up with anything better, so I went to sleep.

Unknown

CHAPTER 24

The Return of

Pinchie Winchie, or,

You’re Only Young

Forever

I WAS ON A plane headed for Las Vegas. I wasn’t going to Vegas to perform, or play golf, or gamble. All these were pursuits I had given up for life. I was traveling as a tourist, a tourist with nothing special to do and nobody special to do it with. I had some idea of kibitzing the action in the casinos, taking in a few of the shows, lying around in the sun for a while-but beyond that, nothing.

I had been retired for nine months now. My costume was in mothballs. My harp was in storage. My golf clubs I had given away. I didn’t miss any of these things. The only things I had lost by retiring were my tan and a little weight. I might have looked pastier, and saggier, and older, but I was back in good health, and that was the only important thing. That was why I told myself I had no regrets about the decision I had made on the first day of my first stay in the hospital.

The plane landed at the Vegas airport. The other passengers walked up each others’ heels in their hurry to get off. Yet they were hardly a gay crowd. All of them had a hollow-eyed and hungry look, and they talked under their breaths. They were indistinguishable from suckers going to the slaughter of the gaming tables anywhere-Monte Carlo, Covington, Juan-les-Pins, or the old Saratoga Springs. But they happened to be going to Las Vegas, and I happened to be the only tourist among them, and they bored me.

Briefly, I considered getting on the next plane out of there and going back home. I nixed the idea. Susan’s insinuations had been pretty plain. It would be better for everybody if I didn’t hang around the house for a while.

Actually, I had retired three times in the past nine months, after a total of three heart attacks. The first and second times I got sprung from the hospital I called it quits but I never quite believed it. Now, after the third time, I believed it. This was for good.

The summer after my first illness had been a period of discovery for me. First, I discovered I didn’t miss playing the harp, not a bit. Second, I took up painting again, and found it very exciting. Third, I found that time passed just as fast doing nothing as it had when my days were full of activity.

When I was released from the hospital, we closed up the house in Cathedral City. Susan packed the kids into the station wagon and off they went on a camping trip through the Rockies. I took a quiet bachelor apartment in West Hollywood, where I could devote the summer to adjusting to my new life, under the eye of my doctor.

I made my own breakfasts, usually had lunch at Hillcrest, and for dinners I made the rounds of the family-from Bill’s place to Groucho’s to Gummo’s to Chico’s. Between meals I painted, I read, I watched TV, I napped, or I did absolutely nothing.

The nearest I came to playing anything was taking pills at night. I was on a complicated, round-the-clock schedule of drugs. The line-up beside my bed was formidable-pills and capsules of all sizes and shapes, to be taken at different intervals. I hated to turn on a light during the night, so I practiced with the bottles until I could tell them apart by the sound they made when I shook them. I got an alarm clock with an illuminated dial. Whenever the alarm went off for a pill-time I only had to reach behind me and shake the bottles until I heard the right one, take my capsule or tablet, reset the alarm, and go back to sleep.

I’m probably not the first guy who ever played the harp by ear and certainly not the first to play the piano that way, but I don’t know of anybody else who can play pills by ear.

I was turning out four and five paintings a day. I worked in water colors, a new medium for me. I’d taken it up while I was in the hospital, where I first felt the urge to paint again, and where oils would have been too messy. Water colors were fun, but I was getting into a rut. Every summer landscape I did turned into Vermont as seen from Neshobe Island. Every winter landscape looked like Watertown, New York, as seen from a hotel window. Every figure I did turned into a guy in the rain under a black umbrella. The black umbrella had no significance except that it was the best way to cover up the guy’s face when it didn’t turn out right-and it never turned out right.

What I needed was a fresh approach. I should switch to another medium. I didn’t want to mess up the apartment with oils, so I got a bunch of art books to see what else there was. I found the perfect medium. The inspiration for it came partly from the art books and partly from the new diet my doctor put me on. For breakfast I could eat the whites of two eggs. This presented the problem of what to do with the yolks. The answer: paint in casein, which could be prepared with the yolk of an egg.

It got me out of the rut. My painting loosened up to the point where I could do abstractions. To me this was a big step forward. But everybody who saw my collection asked if I wouldn’t please paint them “one of those charming figures with the black umbrella.” I could have sold them by the gross.

That was when I discovered how I was different from most people. Most people have a conscious mind and a subconscious. Not me. I’ve always operated on a subconscious and a sub-subconscious.

By August I was in another kind of a rut. I was homesick. With every postcard I got from the family, from Arizona, Colorado or Montana, I felt worse. I now spent more time at the Hillcrest than I did painting, but that didn’t help much. The only guys who hung around there after lunch played cards or shot golf. The Round Table was often empty by two o’clock. George Burns was producing television programs and getting up a show of his own to do in Reno and Vegas. Jessel wasn’t around long enough between hops to Seattle, Minneapolis, Tallahassee and Tel Aviv to ever get a monologue going. Benny was busy. Cantor was busy. Berle was in New York. Danny Kaye was overseas. Groucho, when he wasn’t working on his new book, was doing his TV show. And Chico, of course, was unavoidably detained at the Friars Club. Everybody was busy but me.

When the end of summer came and I drove home to Cathedral City, it was like coming back from Russia. Susan and the kids arrived the next day. My exile was over.

Susan and I converted the utility room next to the garage into a two-man studio. Now, every morning after the kids left for school, the dogs jumped into the pool and Mom and Dad went to paint. We were ideal partners in a studio. She preferred oils and she was a hell of a draftsman. I preferred non-oil paints. I couldn’t draw worth a damn, never could get anything in perspective, so I had to let my colors do all the talking. I admired her drawing. She admired the way I used color.

But I couldn’t stick with it very long. The joy of homecoming was wearing off. I’d start out painting up a storm, sloshing wild strokes onto my board, then I’d peter out. I’d wander through the house. I’d go out and talk to Minnie’s horses and scratch the dogs behind the ears. I’d take a tour of the acreage in the golf cart to inspect the trees we’d planted. I’d come back to the house and look for something to read. I couldn’t find anything that would hold my attention. I’d turn on television. Nothing but old movies and soap operas. I’d go back to the studio. Susan would be halfway through a new painting. I’d look at what I’d started two hours ago and I’d throw it in the trash.

I knew why I was restless. I was itching to get my fingers on the harp strings. I was itching to grip a golf club again. I’d been kidding myself. Why the hell should I sit around and read and paint? I was, as they say, living on velvet anyway.

One day I gave the strings a swipe when I passed the harp. The next day I paused to play a couple of chords. The day after that I sat down and played a chorus of “I’ve Got Rhythm.” On the fourth day I practiced for half an hour, then went out and putted a golf ball around the swimming pool.

That afternoon, I found out later, Susan made a frantic call to Gummo. She told him I was showing symptoms of sneaking out of retirement. She made him promise that he’d turn down all offers for me to perform, no matter where or for whom or for how much loot, before word of them got to me. Gummo promised.

Susan’s call was not really necessary. On the fifth day I had another heart attack, much like the first one, and I was carted off to L.A. for another six weeks flat on my ass in a hospital bed.

When I came home it was the same story all over again. I swore I was retired for good. I went back to painting, and for a while I painted like a fiend. Then I got restless. I got the itchy fingers. I started to practice again. I felt so great I called Gummo and told him I was ready to take on any date, anywhere-TV, clubs, benefits, anything. Gummo said he’d let me know as soon as anything came in. He was lying, of course. Susan, alarmed over my symptoms, had already talked to him and made him renew his promise that no offer of work should reach my tender ears.

I spent quite a bit of time in the city, at the Hillcrest. I got talking to producers and agents there, and that’s how I found out about the plot between Susan and Gummo. Several guys asked nee how come I was turning down jobs. I told them I wasn’t-on the contrary, I was looking. That wasn’t the way they got it from Gummo, they said.

This burned me up. But before I could do anything about it, I had another attack. This one hit me while I was in downtown Palm Springs, shopping with Susan. I felt like I’d been flattened by a sandbag.

The doctor made no bones about it. This was no “mild attack.” It was an acute coronary.

The day I came out of the hospital I called Gummo myself. I told him I was no longer a client of his, or of anybody else’s. I had had it. I had finally had some sense scared into me. I was putting the harp in storage, along with my costume, and I was getting rid of my golf clubs.

“I hope to God you’re serious,” said Gummo. “Couple more rounds like this and you’ll have retired more times than Sarah Bernhardt.”

“I was never more serious in my life,” I told Gummo.

I went back to painting, and put in an hour or two a day working on notes for my book. I went over to the county seat, Indio, and put in for unemployment insurance. I took my pills and stuck to my diet and my rest schedule like a good boy.

Before I knew it, I came away from a weekly examination with a clean bill of health. The doctor said I’d made a damn near unbelievable recovery. Susan said even she was amazed, having watched me improve in front of her eyes, from day to day.